Bozo Sapiens
Why to Err is Human
Kaplan, Michael
Kaplan, Ellen
Hardcover
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
A dazzling new work of popular science and psychology for readers who enjoyed Blink, Stumbling on Happiness, or The Black Swan. The New York Times called the Kaplans look at probability in everyday life, Chances Are, a dizzying, exhilarating ride. Now they take readers on a new fun-house tourexploring the burgeoning science of why humans make mistakes. Our species, it appears, is hardwired to get things wrong in myriad different ways. Why did recipients of a loan offer accept a higher rate of interest when a pretty womans face was printed on the flyer? Why did one poll on immigration find the most despised aliens were ones from a group that did not exist? What made four of the air forces best pilots fly their planes, in formation, straight into the ground? Why does giving someone power make him more likely to chew with his mouth open and pick his nose? And why is your sister going out with that biker dude? In fact, our cognitive, logical, and romantic failures may be a fair price for our extraordinary success as a speciesthey are the necessary cost of our adaptability. Michael and Ellen Kaplan swoop effortlessly across neurochemistry, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines, to answer, with both clarity and wit, the questions aboveand larger ones about what it means to be human.
AUTHOR BIO
Michael and Ellen Kaplan are mother and son, and coauthors of the bestselling Chances Are: Adventures in Probability. Michael is an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker who resides in Edinburgh, Scotland. Ellen is an archaeologist and cofounder of the Math Circle, a program for the exploration and enjoyment of mathematics. She is coauthor of The Art of the Infinite: The Pleasures of Mathematics and Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free. She lives in central Massachusetts.
BOOK REVIEWS
Obvious logical errors are always the ones other people make. Michael and Ellen Kaplan put this self-serving idea to rest, brilliantly and wittily exploring the sources of the fallacies that infect the thinking of us all. Bozo Sapiens is a book rich not only in examples, but in wisdom. Every one of its readers will learn from it.Denis Dutton, author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human EvolutionThe mother-son co-authors of Chances Are: Adventures in Probability (2006) turn their considerable authorial skills and wit to human behavior, from our isolated cave-dwelling ancestors to todays globalized, interconnected world Gourmet readingrich in ideas, global references and amusing and provocative examples, served with great style.Kirkus
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 1596914009
ISBN(13-digit): 9781596914001
Dewey Decimal: 153.4/2
Library of Congress: 2008044407
Book Publisher: St Martins Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 294
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